TERRAFORMING TERRA
We discuss and comment on the role agriculture will play in the containment of the CO2 problem and address protocols for terraforming the planet Earth.
A model farm template is imagined as the central methodology. A broad range of timely science news and other topics of interest are commented on.

Thursday, December 15, 2011

Moderate Islam

This is a transcript of a
discussion on the nature of Islam and how it may be engaged and ultimately
brought through a natural reformation that cleanses it of the doctrine of
abrogation which slants it toward open jihad.

Curiously, I think it is
happening in spite of the radicals or perhaps because of the radicals and far
more importantly the advent of social media.Moderate Islam is coalescing around moderate leadership that listens to
their legitimate aspirations.In fact
social media is self organizing the political life of the Islamic world outside
of the mosque and the change is historic and away from Islamic model.

The resurgence of radical Islam in
the past decades can be viewed merely as the initial success of first adopters.With every man on board, the radical voice is
buried in the crowd and soon turned on because of past excesses.

This is a very optimistic
position, but the Arab Spring needs to be seen in that light even as radical
elements attempt to jump on the horse which will soon humble them.The Arab spring is not Springtime for Mohammad.

The
panel discussion below recently took place at David Horowitz’s Restoration Weekend in West
Palm Beach, Florida
(Nov. 17-20, 2011). The transcript follows. To view the question and answer
session, clickhere.

Karen Lugo: I thought this
panel was of critical importance because so many of us are out there trying to
talk about Islam. And there is always the question — what about moderate
Muslims? And there’s always the question — how do we identify Muslims who
would be supportive of patriotic American Constitutional values?

So over the last six months, I’ve been fairly
involved in this kind of a public discussion, where I’ve done over 50 radio interviews
in the last three, four months. I’ve been before five city councils,
county board of supervisors, city planning commissions on mosque permits, and
learning with a core group of people in my area how to have this conversation
with public entities, elected officials.

We have also visited mosques on Open Mosque
Day. We went, and to show — rather than just kind of cursing the
darkness, which — at the DavidHorowitzFreedomCenter, we are very good
about identifying what is the challenge to our Western traditions. But in
our case, we’ve decided to go into the mosques and ask the questions, record
the answers, engage in a very local community fashion; so that we know who in
our community is participating with us and supporting the Constitutional values
and liberties that we support in America.

So in doing this, of course, it has been a
matter of how we have this conversation. And there are no better
qualified people to do this than the four panelists that will be discussing it
today.

You may have already been somewhat involved in
tracking the debate — the discussion, conversation — that Andrew McCarthy and
Robert Spencer have been having on National Review Online. I’m going to
introduce the panelists in series. They will speak in series for about 10
minutes each. And then we’ll have some time for questions. Those of
you that are just coming in, there are additional chairs on the way. So
they should be arriving soon. I will check on those in just a minute.

But we wanted to leave as much time as
possible. We do only have an hour. So we wanted to leave as much
time as we could for question-and-answer.

So I will be cutting the biographies fairly
short. You’ll see most of these panelists again this weekend. And
we all are friends, I think, with most of the people that we see up here.

So, first of all, Andrew McCarthy. With
all of the work that I do, I either hear, “But Andrew McCarthy said,” or
“Robert Spencer said,” as I’m working with all of the citizen activists in my
area. So both Andrew and Robert are very, very well known.

But we know and love Andy for the fact that in
1995, he successfully prosecuted the Blind Sheikh.
He is also author of “Willful Blindness,” which is the story of that
prosecution, and very interesting for learning what our criminal courts can and
cannot do, and the possible hazards of having these trials in criminal
courts. He’s also written “The Grand Jihad,” and he’s up on National
Review Online. And so, definitely make sure you are following him there.

Robert Spencer has written many books on Islam
and helping us understand what is at the core and the heart of Islam.
Robert also famously — at least, in my opinion — is a consultant for many
military as well as some civilian enterprises. And I was delighted to be
reading — I’m a big fan of Brad Thor novels. And the last one that I
read, which was “The Last Patriot” — at the end of the book, Robert Spencer is
credited as having advised Brad Thor. So I was greatly excited to know
that.

But in addition, I was just as the Federalist
Society convention, and former Attorney General Michael Mukasey gave a seminal
speech on Islam, starting with the history and going right to where we are in
this nation today. Was very courageous, very declarative. And in
that speech, he quoted our own Robert Spencer. So we are very proud and
pleased to have Robert on this panel as well.

And then, a new face to some of us — Bosch
Fawstin, who is a cartoonist and has been nominated for several awards,
including one that’s the equivalent of an Emmy. He is working on a
graphic novel which will be called “The Infidel.” And his lead
character/superhero is called Pigman.

(Laughter)

And as the Europeans have learned, there is a
very, very interesting and, I think, proper role in a society like ours for wit
and for ridicule in a smart fashion. I’m one who’s very emphatic about
reasonable speech. But provoking the discussion, I think, in a smart and
clever way can sometimes be a very productive thing. So we’re very
interested to hear from Bosch today.

And then finally, we will hear from the Baroness Caroline Cox,
who was recommended for her peerage by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
She’s a cross-bench member of the House of Lords and
was Deputy Speaker from 1986 to 2006. She’s very involved now in African
and Armenian human rights issues and supporting the Christian communities
against the Muslim oppression. And she also was involved in a lot of
other human rights concerns.

She’s known as a Euro-skeptic. Here in
the US,
we call people phobic when they’re against something. But in Great Britain,
she’s a skeptic, a Euro-skeptic. And importantly, she has introduced over
this last summer an initiative called One Law for All, which would bring the
Sharia tribunals back under the British courts.

So, we’ll start with Andrew McCarthy.

(Applause)

Andrew McCarthy: Thank you,
Karen.

Karen was good enough to mention the Blind
Sheikh case. And it’s worth going back to it because this is sort of how
I not only come into this challenge, but to try to reflect the debt I owe to
Robert Spencer. I think that when I got involved in trying to confront
this — really, civilizational threat is the right way to put it — I knew
nothing more about Islam than somebody’s who’s got a reasonably good education
in the United States, which is to say not much.

And I wanted to believe what we were saying as
a Justice Department, which was essentially that there was a fringe group —
very, very small; almost unnoticeable, except that they were involved in
committing such heinous acts — but they were totally unrepresentative of Islam,
and that if we could just shave off this fringe, everything would be
fine. Because Islam itself was peaceful and wonderful, and one of the
great religious traditions of the world. And I wanted to believe
that. And I think almost everybody in the government, when we first
started to say those sorts of things, really did believe that.

What ended up happening was — in almost every
trial, whether the lead defendant testifies or not, you have to get ready for
him as if he were going to testify — and so it was with the Blind Sheikh.
And he didn’t end up testifying. But I actually had to go to school on
everything that we had that he had either written or said. And he was a
very prolific speaker and writer.

And the problem that emerged over time, as I
got immersed in his work product, was that every place that he said that the
scripture said X or Y, he was not lying. He was not perverting
Islam. It turned out that every place that he purported to quote
scripture he was correct.

And you know, I wasn’t going to try to get
into a theological debate with a doctor of Islamic jurisprudence from Al-AzharUniversity. But I did think, if we
were right, that we ought to be able to nail him in one or two or three
places. And there was no place you could do that.

Then, it started to dawn on me slowly that —
well, you know, there’s not a whole lot that he could do for a terrorist
organization. He can’t build a bomb, can’t conduct an attack.
There’s nothing really that you would think of that a terrorist organization
does that this guy would be particularly useful for them on, except that he was
a doctor of Islamic jurisprudence, graduated from Al-Azhar University.
And that singularly was the source of his ability to influence this movement
and, actually, in fact, made him the most important person in the cell and in
the cells that were being constructed. Because without his green light,
things would not go forward, which I think underscores how powerful the
ideology is that we’re talking about.

And then there was the final thing that really
pushed me over the edge, which was we had a very extensive defense case,
because we had such a long trial. The trial was nine months long. I
think the defense case took about two and a half months. And during the
course of the defense case, we had people who were actually moderate Muslim
people who would come in to testify. And they really were moderate people
— they wouldn’t commit a terrorist act or even think about committing a
terrorist act, no matter what.

But every now and then while they were on the
stand, some question about Islam would come up — you know, what does jihad
mean, what is Sharia, what is Zakat? And three or four times, these
perfectly nice, moderate people would say — well, I wouldn’t be qualified to
render an opinion on that. You’d have to ask someone like him. And
they would always point to the homicidal maniac –

(Laughter)

– in the corner of my courtroom. And I
thought it was — in real-life terms, it was a very powerful lesson — that you
had these people who were ordinary, peaceful people who would not become
terrorists under any circumstances. And yet, with respect to principal
parts of their belief system, they were willing to take their guidance from
somebody who was a five-alarm terrorist. So I thought — I came away thinking, from that
experience, that man, we have this just totally backwards.

The good thing about a trial, particularly a
trial of that nature, is that no matter what politically correct thing the
government happens to be saying on the courthouse steps or down in Washington,
in the four corners of the trial, you actually have to prove to people what
happened, what the people did and why they did it. So we didn’t have
politically correct Islam in our courtroom; we actually had, you know, what I
now call Islamist ideology. And the question is — is it Islamist
ideology, or is it Islam?

There’s the other side of this. We could
not have done that case without patriotic American Muslims who helped us at
every step of the way, either by infiltrating the cells, by helping us whip the
evidence into shape, by helping us present it, by giving us intelligence.
It was a very interesting dynamic. There were many people who were in the
Muslim community, rank-and-file Muslims, who wanted to help the government,
knowing exactly what it was that we were doing. Their condition to me
usually was — I can only help you if no one will ever find out that I spoke to
you.

And it became very obvious to us that there
was a big divide between rank-and-file Muslim people in the community, who — at
least among the older generations of them — tended to be pro-American and
pro-Western, and the leadership of the mosques and the Islamic communities, who
tended to be very heavily influenced by overseas elements, particularly
the Muslim Brotherhood.
So you had this divide.

Here’s the problem. The guys from
overseas, whether it’s the Muslim Brotherhood or the other groups that give the
guidance to both the mosques and the community centers — when they quote
scripture, it’s not like they’re — when they tell you what they think, and they
root it in Islam, it’s not like they’re dancing on the head of a pin.
When they say it’s in there, it’s in there. And when they rely on it,
they are not relying on something that’s an aberration.

And this goes to, as I said, the debt I owe to
Robert. I think singularly in the country, if there’s anybody who has
given us a coherent, deep read on what this ideology really is — and the fact
that it is not just coherent, but it is mainstream, and it is what basically is
the mainstream ideology of Sunni Islam — it’s Robert Spencer.

(Applause)

And I continue to learn every day, reading
what Robert writes.

The issue we have — and whether it’s
debate-worthy or discussion-worthy, or what worthy — I’ll leave it to you to
decide — is — what do we do about the non-Islamist Muslims? And I’ve
assumed a fact that’s not in evidence, which is that “Islamist” is even a valid
term, but engage me for a moment. I think it’s absolutely clear that the
marriage of the political elements and what are the spiritual elements of Islam
are one. And in mainstream Islamic scripture, mainstream Islamic
doctrine, there’s no question that there’s no division between the sacred
authority and the political authority — they’re one.

The reality of the world, however, is that we
have many, many Muslims, millions and millions of Muslims, who don’t want to
live that way, who embrace the West, who don’t want to live in Sharia
societies. Some of them are trying to interpret their religion in a way
that, as they say, contextualizes the troublesome elements of it, so that they
can create an Islam that’s congenial to Western ideas about separating church
and state, separating the religious elements from the political.

I confess, when I read what they write, I
don’t find it particularly compelling. For the most part, I think it’s a
work in progress. I think, you know, compared to what I like to call
Islamist ideology, it’s not particularly coherent, it’s not well-rooted in
scripture the way that Islamic — what I call Islamist ideology is. But I
think we have to give them the space to try to evolve their belief systems.

And the reason I use the term “Islamist,” the
reason I think it’s a valuable term to use — a means of separating one camp
from the other — is I just don’t think that if you’re taking people who we want
to have on our side in this struggle — and the people who we have to hope at
some point will be able to reform if not the entirety of their religion, at
least the way that it exists in the West — that we have to have some space
where they can do that. And I think the distinction between Islam and
Islamist allows us to identify the people who actually want to impose Sharia on
the West versus the people who are Muslims — whether they’re just culturally
Muslim or they have a different way of interpreting their religion — but who
want to live here and live among us as Americans, as Westerners; and not be
identified as Sharia Muslims.

Am I confident that that will happen, that
those people will actually succeed, that they can actually reform their religion?
No, not particularly. But I think we have to give them a chance.
I’m not completely convinced they can’t do it, either. But I just don’t
see what the sense is of taking your natural allies — the people that you want
on your side, the people who have in their community actually contributed to
our counterterrorism — and tell them that the problem is their religion, is
their belief system; and that, you know — basically address them in a way that
tells them that we think that their choice is basically to convert.
Because, you know, the problem that we face is Islam.

And I say that, I hope, with my eyes
open. I appreciate the fact that a lot of the people who use the term
“Islamist” use it in a fraudulent way, to suggest that, you know, the Islamists
are just — what I was talking about back in 1993, just a handful of terrorists;
and everybody else is a moderate Muslim. And I think if that’s going to
be their interpretation of it, it is a useless term, and we should reject it.

But we do have people who are trying to reform
this belief system. And I think we have to give them what encouragement
we have to give. I’ll leave it at that.

(Applause)

Robert Spencer: Andy said we’d
have to — what do we do about the non-Islamist Muslims? And I’d like to
amend the question just slightly, to say — what do we do about the non-Islamist
Muslim? And after we have expressed our support for Zuhdi Jasser, then
where do we go?

(Laughter)

(Applause)

I’m, of course, exaggerating. There are
indeed the people who worked with the prosecution in the case of the Blind
Sheikh, and there are many others who work. But they work under the cover
of darkness, they work not wanting to be recognized, precisely because the
situation is what it is within Islam.

The question about giving people the space to
reform the religion cannot really be answered until we understand how religions
reform in the first place. And do we reform the religion of Islam by
pretending that it is other than what it is? Or do we reform the religion
of Islam by confronting the elements of it that are outrageous to universally
accepted notions of human rights, and call upon Muslims who do want to live
according to universally recognized notions of human rights to fight against
those ideas? There aren’t really very many historical precedents for
reformation in religion. But of course, the main one is the Reformation.

So let me put it to you this way.
Imagine, in 1517, that instead of nailing the 95 theses to the door of the
church in Gutenberg that Martin Luther had
said — how dare you suggest that the Catholic Church teaches the primacy of the
Pope and the doctrines of transubstantiation and the perpetual virginity of
Mary. You must be a venomous Catholic-hater, a Catholophobe.

(Laughter)

And I stand for the true Catholicism, which
has none of that in it — now, that would have been absurd. Because
obviously, the Church did teach all those things. And those were the
things, among others, that Martin Luther objected to. And Martin Luther
did not set out to reform the Church. Whatever one may think of the necessity
or the veracity of the charges, all that is beside the point. But he did
not set out to reform the Church by pretending it was otherwise than what it
was. He set out to reform the Church by confronting the doctrines he
thought were false and calling upon people to discard them.

Now, that ended up creating a schism, of
course, a number of schisms, such that there are Catholics and Protestants in
the world today. And maybe that’s what would happen in Islam.

But the problem is also compounded by the
fact that Islam has a doctrine of religious deception. It not only has
doctrines of warfare and subjugation of unbelievers that are universal among
the sects and schools of law in Islam, but it also has doctrines of
deception. And that makes it doubly difficult.

Because unfortunately, I think, with all the
best intensions, Andy — by trying to separate out the supremacists and marshal
elements of Islam from Islam — is enabling the deceivers. Because the
deceivers sound just like reformers. Or almost just like reformers.
They come around — and actually, you can turn on the television any given
moment and see them, and they’ll say — Islam doesn’t teach any of this, and we
reject all this. And we abhor terrorism. And really, the problem is
Islamophobia and unjustified suspicion of the peaceful Muslim community.

And invariably, when you start to look into
the people who are saying this, they’re connected to one or another Muslim
Brotherhood group. And the Muslim Brotherhood, of course — as you all,
I’m certain, know — is dedicated, in its own words, to eliminating and
destroying Western civilization from within. And what better way to do
that but to render us complacent in the face of the reality of this threat, and
make it such that we are afraid to speak about it in its full dimensions?
Because we think, on the one hand, that if we do that we will be charged with
being bigoted, racist and hateful, and our professional prospects will be
dim. And you know, I certainly know that. I’m 10 years an
Islamophobe now, and I can’t get another job.

(Laughter)

But also, that we will be discouraging the few
actual genuine Muslim reformers will be hurting Zuhdi.

And so, for those two reasons, we cannot speak
about this problem honestly. And so, the situation we are in now is one that
I think was summed up very tellingly by a young man in a video store who ended
up foiling the FortDix jihad plot.

We all know, of course, that in FortHood,
Major Nidal Hasan murdered
13 Americans in a jihad attack. And we know, of course, that the United
States government in its report on that attack never mentioned jihad or Islam,
even though the guy was handing out Korans that morning, and he was shouting
Allahu Akbar, and had given off many signs of what he was all about for years
before that. And that is, of course, part of the fact — the reason why
the government does that is because we don’t want to alienate the moderate
Muslim community, which of course also Nidal Hasan lived and moved among, and
they never did anything about him.

But also, there was a lesser-known attempted
attack at FortDix. And at FortDix,
it was a number of Albanian Muslims who were enjoying watching the gory
al-Qaeda videos of beheadings and things like that. But they had them on
VHS. And technology marched on. And so they went to the video store
to get them transferred to DVD.

And — this is a true story. I know it’s
unbelievable. And the young man working in the video store — he’s doing
the job, and he’s seeing these horrible images unfold before his eyes.
And he goes to his manager. And he says — you know, there’s some very
disturbing things on this tape, and I’m thinking maybe we should go to the
police. But would that just be racist?

(Laughter)

This is actually what he said. And to
his credit, the manager encouraged him. They went to the police, they
foiled the plot.

But the point is that in both cases, you have
the entire United States
government, and you have individuals who have been breathing the air of our
politically correct culture. And they are afraid to confront this
monstrous evil because they think that it will cause some even greater evil if
they do. And so they dissimulate, and they pretend that things are other
than the way they are. And what exactly does it get us?

I can’t tell you how many times — and I expect
if you thought that you would be in the same situation — how many times have
you read an article since 9/11 that said — it’s time for the moderate Muslims
in the United States to stand up and show that they oppose this? And
then, the next year — it’s time for — and every year, it’s time. Well,
when are they going to get on it? When are we going to learn the lesson
of the fact that they have not done so, and examine the implications of that?

The reality is that Islam does teach these
things, as Andy acknowledges. Islam does teach warfare and
subjugation. If there are Muslims — and there certainly are — who do not
want to kill or subjugate us, then I applaud them. But they can only
succeed if they confront the problem honestly.

And we can only truly encourage them if we
confront the problem honestly. Anything else leads to bad policy.
We’ve been pretending they weren’t Islamists in Pakistan for a decade now, giving
them billions every year to fight al-Qaeda. And what’d they do?
They gave the money to al-Qaeda. But we had our Islam/Islamist
distinction, and they were on the good side. And so that was as far as it
went. Well, the implications are obvious.

Thank you.

(Applause)

Bosch Fawstin: Hello. I’m
honored to be here. I was invited here with a short notice. So if
you don’t mind, I’m going to read some stuff that I prepared.

I come from a Muslim Albanian background, and
born and raised in America.
We were non-devout. But it was enough where it still had detrimental
things in our lives growing up.

So, you know, one thing — the entire context
here is the fact that we are at war. We are at war. This is not —
we’re indulging things that are outside of that in order to try to create this
Islam that doesn’t exist. Because there are, you know, Muslims who are
not terrorists; therefore, they’re practicing some other sort of Islam.
And they’re not. You know, they’re practicing life in a free country,
they’re practicing something other than Islam.

You know, as Jerome Brooks said — you know,
even though I disagree with him in terminology, we agree on this — we need to
identify the enemy and do whatever is necessary to eliminate the threat, with
minimal loss of life and liberty on our side.

You know, Andrew McCarthy said — early this
morning, he said we need to put American interests first. I absolutely
agree with that. So we need to identify the right terms to use so we can
defend our interests. [I think] Islam — you know, not Islamism, militant
Islam, radical Islam, totalitarian Islam, every other Islam that we hear about
—

Islam is the right term to name the ideology
that we must criticize, reject, ultimately defeat, regardless of there are
non-Muslim Muslims out there. And the implication with all those terms is
that Islam as such is fine. It’s all the other, bad Islams that are the
problem.

And you know, post-9/11, I read the
Koran. I read Robert’s books. Everything I could get my hands on —
jihad, Islam. And I just — Islam is not fine, Islam as such. Islam
promotes anti-Semitism, misogyny. And being raised again as a non-devout
Muslim, there was still an admiration for Hitler in my household.
My cousins. Because of the anti-Semitism. And Hitler — there was a
mutual admiration society between Nazism and Islam. Hitler admired Islam
as a “masculine religion.”

And you know, besides the explicit doctrines
of jihad and Sharia, I know firsthand from being raised by non-devout Muslims —
my mom, even — I come home one day, and she’s crying. And I was worried
about her. I said — what happened, what happened? My first niece
was born. And she was mourning the birth of a female, of a baby
girl.

Because she had projected the idea that her
life would be miserable. It will have to be miserable, there’s no way
out. And in Islam, women, in a lot of ways, are necessary evils.
They can bring into the world male Muslim heirs.

Besides that — and while it’s true that only a
small minority actually wage jihad — small minority of Muslims — it’s equally true that only a small
minority criticize them. How many Muslims celebrated 9/11? Far
too many. We don’t even know. In America,
the Middle East, Europe. You know.
And imagine in the past, if we referred to enemy ideologies such as radical
Nazism.

(Laughter)

Militant communism. You know, that kind
of thinking leads us to try to find moderate Nazis. You know.

(Applause)

In lieu of waging a proper war in our
defense. Because that’s the most important thing here — our
defense. Not their defense, not the Muslim world’s future — our
future. And you know, besides using the correct term, “Islam,” at times,
in order to distinguish between individual Muslims and Islam as such, I use the
term “organized Islam.” That doesn’t connote anything besides the fact
that [you have] Islam is bad as such. And if it’s organized, it’s even
worse.

Individual Muslims — they are what they are. They
don’t want to take part in it. But they — you know, I have family who don’t
want to talk about jihad; never, ever talk about it. They want to remain
— they identify themselves as Muslim. But they eat pork, they have dogs —
which are considered filthy in Islam. They’re — I call them post-Islamic
Muslims, you know. They’re not Muslim in any serious way. But they
sure as hell don’t want to say anything against jihad, which is
troubling. Because they give a good face to an evil ideology.

And that’s a real problem. Because people keep saying
— well, I know a good Muslim. He’s, you know, a nice guy. But he
doesn’t personify the religion. You know, and if he does — if he’s
pro-Israel, he sure as hell doesn’t, you know, personify the religion.
And you know, my thinking is, in general, your average Muslim is morally
superior to Mohammad, morally superior to Islam itself. It’s the
consistent practitioners who are the problem.

Then you got individuals like Irshad Manji, who wants Islam
to return to its fun — clever, fun-loving roots.

(Laughter)

She’s another non-Muslim Muslim. And Zuhdi Jasser —
while he may be a good individual amongst us, according to Islam, he’s
bad. Because he’s like — he might as well be an apostate. You know,
you can’t be against Sharia, against jihad, and be for Islam. In a
literal sense, you really can’t. So his Islam, in a lot of ways, I call
Zuhdi Jasser-ism.

(Laughter)

You know, it’s a subjective, individualist view of
Islam. And it gets in the way of us seeing the actual threat for what it
is and what it promotes.

And then, you know, the political agenda furthering the
myth of “moderate Islam” is good only insofar as it furthers our
interests. We cannot sacrifice the truth or refrain from fighting the war
we need to fight in the proper way. I see no widespread moderate
movement, and I don’t want to help create one at our expense.

Thank you.

(Applause)

Baroness Caroline Cox:Well, good afternoon.

And I stand before you this afternoon as someone who has no
illusions whatever about the threats of contemporary Islamism, political Islam
and strategic Islam to our liberal democracies. And I’m deeply concerned
about the way in which political Islam is using the freedoms of democracy to
destroy democracy itself and the freedoms it enshrines.

My own engagement with Islam began actually further afield,
when I confronted military Islam firsthand, face to face, in the warzones of
Southern Indonesia, in the Malukas and Sulawesi. And Laskar Jihad was
there. And many hundreds were being killed and thousands displaced [in] Ambon. And 5,000 Laskar Jihad warriors [were in] Ambon alone and saw the killings.

I’ve been in Sudan
and Southern Sudan many times, over 30 times, in the war against the South,
when Khartoum
was perpetrating its jihad against the peoples of the South. And I went
30 times to areas designated as no-go areas to international aid
organizations. Because they didn’t want to aid victims or anyone to tell
the world what it was doing. So I went to those places 30 times.
They do not love me. They give me a prison sentence for illegal
entry. So thank you for being inclusive and having a convict with you
this afternoon.

Northern Nigeria — we’re currently working in Northern Nigeria. Many killings already this year
in Northern Nigeria.

And as far as the UK is concerned, at the moment we
are confronting very real strategies by political Islam, as I said, to use the
freedoms of democracy to destroy that democracy. And I discern nine kinds
of strategies being used by political Islam around the world today, including
in Britain.
And I’ll be saying a little bit about this tonight and much more tomorrow
afternoon.

But those strategies include the political strategies;
legal — we already have Sharia law in United Kingdom — financial — Sharia
finance is extremely dangerous — demographic strategies, and cultural — massive
investment in our cultural institutions to try and attain a culture of
hegemony; and abroad, military jihad, and the humanitarian — use of
humanitarian aid.

So I’m not an optimist at all. Not naïve. When
I look at the nature of Islam itself as a traditional religion, I would share
your analyses earlier on. Yes, of course there are the verses of the
sword, but there are — I mean, there are versus of peace. They sound so
irenic, and we could all love to think that they were the real motivating force
of international Islam.

The verses of the sword are there. And what is very
worrying is the principle of abrogation — that because the verses of the sword
are inconsistent with the verses of peace, and Allah cannot be inconsistent,
the traditional Islamic scholars developed the principle of abrogation, whereby
the later revelations of the Prophet abrogated the earlier revelations.
And unfortunately for all of us, the later revelations were the verses of the
sword. So Islam is not inherently a religion of peace.

Similarly, amongst the teachings of Islam, the world is
only divided into two — the dar al-harb or the dar al-Islam. The world of
Islam — we’re already living under Islam — or the world of war. There’s
no alternative. So if you’re not living in an Islamic nation, you’re
living in a world of war. And of course, you have an obligation to do
what you can to try to achieve that for Islam. And that, as we already
heard, is perfect legit to use deception [or to kill], as any of us might in a
war situation. So I’m not an optimist at all, as will be coming up very
clearly in my later presentations.

But what may we perhaps do in this context? First of
all, I would say to all of us — we must know our Islam. Do our
homework. (Inaudible) in Britain,
there are often very well-meaning interfaith dialogues. And the
Christians come. The Christians spend the whole time apologizing for all
the dreadful things we did in the Crusades, and everything else. I mean,
I say the Crusades were nothing to apologize about — they were the response to
400 years of Islamic aggression. But we’ve got a great guilt complex about
the Crusades, so we spend our time apologizing, and our Muslim friends agree,
so it’s all very peaceful. And that’s many of our interfaith dialogues.

But also, I think we must — and I’ll be saying more about
this later — begin to draw very clear lines in the sand, to say enough is
enough, to protect our democratic freedoms and our precious heritage — our
freedom, for which many have died. And among the ways of doing that — in Britain at the
moment, I am introducing a private members bill in the House of Lords to try to
address the question of Sharia law. We already have over 60 Sharia courts
in UK.
And of course, they have fundamental discrimination against women, so they
violate all our purported commitments to gender equality in United Kingdom.
And women are really suffering in Britain — Muslim women are really
suffering.

So that is my black and bleak scenario. But I do
search for some signs, possibly, of hope. And this is where I may diverge
from one or two of the other speakers.

Going back to Indonesia
— when I was down in Indonesia
at the height of the Laskar Jihad’s assaults on the communities there, the
traditional Muslim leaders did not want that jihad. Indonesia, the
world’s largest Islamic nation, does have an honorable tradition of religious
tolerance. It’s written into their [pandrocina], their constitution.

And Christians and Hindus and others have been allowed to
live peaceably in those areas where they have chosen to live for a very long
time. And there were foreign elements that came in from Middle East and Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Laskar
Jihad. But after awhile, the traditional Muslim leaders wanted to
normalize relations with the predominantly Christian communities. And
they were brave people. Because Laskar Jihad didn’t want peace.

And I remember talking to Mr. [Elvi], one of the Muslim
leaders from Ambon. And he said to me —
you know, if I go to the next interfaith meeting and I get killed, my daughter
said to me — daddy, I will be very proud of you. There was a brave
Muslim, who was trying to go against violent Islamist jihad. That’s an
individual — and individuals, from a slightly larger, national level — who was
enabled to hope to establish an organization with an endless title. It’s
called the International Islamic Christian Organisation for Reconciliation and
Reconstruction. [To most, it] abbreviates to IICORR.

But at the launch, the former and our late president of Indonesia,
Abdurrahman Wahid, was present. He was our president, and he was
promoting this. And in his speech, he said something which again is
perhaps something which we can put as a ray of hope on the horizon. And
I’m now paraphrasing, using a terminology he would not use, because it’s a
Christian terminology. But basically, he was saying Islam is at a crossroads;
Islam has to have its reformation. And basically, Islam has to learn how
to do away with that principle of abrogation, whereby the verses of the sword
override the verses of peace.

And that was a very successful initiative. The
British government did fund an interfaith delegation to come to the UK to work out
principles of reconciliation and reconstruction away from the conflict
zone. When they went back, they were able to contain renewed incipient
conflict very quickly because of the good relations established. And
there has been peace in Ambon since
then. I met an Indonesian politician just a few months ago who said that
was a successful initiative.

Now, I have no illusions — Laskar Jihad have gone on
elsewhere. And so we are tiny, tiny, possible beginnings of rays of
hope. I don’t put it much more strongly than that, but that was a
successful initiative.

Secondly, I was preaching — or speaking, rather, at an
interfaith conference in Paris
for the Abrahamic Faiths two or three years ago. And before me, all the
speakers were just so cheerful. It was like pink candy frost, all the
lovely and good, and nothing to be too skeptical about. Interfaith
dialogues and initiatives that were going on everywhere. There wasn’t a
hint of the kind of problems that bring us here together today.

Well, I just felt only the truth could make us free.
So I stood up and gave a rather tougher talk about what I’ve been talking about
— the principle of abrogation, about the nature of Sharia, about the nature of
military jihad, about the sort of things that are challenging us, about
Islamism and traditional Islamic theology. And I came off shaking at the
knees. Because I had been saying the unspeakable things.

There was a Jordanian priest there who, just as I got off
the platform, said — thank you for saying all the things I couldn’t say.
But there were 12 ladies with hijabs from Iraq,
Muslim ladies from Iraq.
I went up there, and I said — ladies, I do hope I haven’t offended you in what
I’ve been saying today about Islam. They said — no. Thank goodness
you were here, we praise God you were here. You’re the only one who spoke
with any sense. We were so fed up with all the stuff that went before, we
were about to go home. You were the only one who said what needed to be
said. And you’re the only one who had the courage to mention Sharia, and
we hate Sharia.

Well, I got to know those Muslim ladies from Iraq
very well. We had little group meetings. I became their very own
baroness. And we were able to share at a very deep level. And there
again were women, Muslim women, who were suffering very much under traditional
Islam.

Thirdly, very briefly — in the UK, as I mentioned, I’m
bringing in a bill to try to address the issue of Sharia law, Sharia courts in
the UK, and particularly with regard to gender discrimination and women
suffering in our country. And there are some brave Muslims who are
supporting me in that bill.

There’s an organization called British Muslims for Secular
Democracy. There’s a very brave young woman, Tehmina Kazi, who’s spoken
out in public on this issue. And she’s had death threats. But she’s
prepared to support this bill.

Also, if any of you are coming to the Olympic games, you
might be relieved to know that as you come into London and into the Olympic arena, you will
not be greeted by a mega-mosque which would’ve seated 70,000 people.

(Applause)

They reduced, very graciously, that concept of a
70,000-strong mosque to 12,000. Well, our largest cathedral takes
three. So even that would’ve been a very strange [somewhere] to welcome
everybody. But that initiative has been forestalled, but with the help of
many Muslims. So I stand before you as someone who is deeply puzzled, and
deeply humbled.

As I finish, I remember a phone call I received very
recently from an Indonesian politician who’d read the book we had written on
Islam — it’ll be available later on. And it’s hard-hitting, it’s the kind
of thing I’ve been talking about this afternoon. But he said — since I
read your book on Islam — he is a Muslim — it reopened for me the gates of
[jihad]. I realized how as a Muslim I’d been brought up in a theological
and mental prison. But now I’ve read your book; I see things differently.

Unless we are available to Muslims — a [message] you said
earlier — we give some space for some of those who are courageous enough, and
maybe risking death to do so — then I think we are perhaps losing a very
important opportunity. Because I have no illusions they’ll be subject to
intimidation. We have all the threats outlined at the beginning.
They are the minority. But I think we must be open to those who might
want to bring about — to use a Christian term, inappropriately — but an Islamic
reformation.

It won’t be in my lifetime. But if it’s possible, we
must support it. If it isn’t, well, we will go on holding the line
against those who would destroy our freedoms.

(Applause)

Karen Lugo:Just a very brief
footnote — as I was involved in a protest — I emceed a protest against two
radical imams in February of this last year. And CAIR, Council on
American-Islamic Relations, put out a hit video, a distorted video, of the
protest to make it all look like hate speech. They did capture some video
of some hecklers that were over by the entrance to this fundraiser.

And later, as this production was going around the
Internet, one of our women, who was from Iran, said she had gone up to the
louder hecklers with megaphones because she recognized the accent. And
she said — where are you from? And the women said — we’re from Iran. And
she said — well, then, are you Muslim? And they said — yes, but we just
hate Sharia. So the head piece actually wound up being of some of those
activists who were — and some of the things they were saying were the most
virulently anti-Islam, but they were Muslims.

Also, in my work with the communities, and the citizens who
become very involved in my area, we’ve spoken with a lot of secular Muslims who
have come up to us. And we’ve had this conversation — you know, why don’t
more Muslims stand up? And they’ve said, you know, look at what happened
in Europe, with the fact that Europe has caved
the way it has. And we don’t see more signs of courage in the United States
yet than we do. You know, we’re waiting to see if you’re going to hold
the line against the radical elements of Islam. So, you know, that is
what the conversation has been.

So at this point, we would love to have some questions
until they tell us that the room is no longer ours.

Yes, sir?

Unidentified Audience Member:So want to go back and look at the history of fascism in Europe in the ’30s, which I kind of relate to this.
I’ve been watching this going on now for several years. And it took till
Hitler and Mussolini were sure enough, and actually tried to take over the
world against (inaudible). And [there was] a real struggle as to whether
or not we were going to be able to defeat the fascists. And fortunately,
we were.

I’m wondering if this is going to drag itself along until
such time that there is a conflagration (inaudible) –

Robert Spencer:If only we had worked with the moderate Nazis, we could’ve
forestalled all that.

(Laughter)

Unidentified Audience Member:— that’s what they were doing, that [was genuine].

Andrew McCarthy:But the Nazis were radical Germans. I mean, it
depends on what level you’re going to evaluate it.

Bosch Fawstin:Well, this is the question, then. See, obviously
there’s a spectrum of belief, knowledge and fervor among Muslims. Nobody
on this panel actually thinks that every Muslim is on with the program of
warfare and subjugation, least of all me. And I’ve made this abundantly
clear in everything that I’ve written. The fact is that there are
probably a majority — there is a majority of Muslims who just want to live
their lives and have a job, and raise their family. And they couldn’t
care less what the imam is saying in the mosque.

But the doctrines of Islam are the source of this
hatred. People have been wondering why they hate us for 10 years. And they hate us because they’re
taught to hate us, not because of our foreign policy, not because of Israel, not because of Iraq or Afghanistan; but because Islam
teaches that Muslims should hate and wage war against and subjugate
non-Muslims. And these things are demonstrably in the Koran. Does
that mean that every Muslim is doing it? Certainly not. But do we
pretend that it doesn’t really teach these things in order to encourage the
ones who aren’t with the program? I don’t see the utility of that.

Andrew McCarthy:Well, let me — if I may, though — what Robert has painted,
I think, is a very black-and-white view. And I have no quarrel with the
idea that this comes rooted from Islamic scripture. But the two
alternatives — or, I guess I shouldn’t say there are two alternatives.
It’s not like we have a choice of — either you acknowledge that the Koran
teaches this and that the scriptures teach this, or you deny it. I mean,
that’s just not reality. There are other ways to address it. If
there aren’t, we’re really at the abyss, right?

But if you ask people — and I’m not contending that this is
a majority view in the slightest — but they have come up with different
interpretations, they have come up with ways, as they say, to try to
contextualize the bad stuff, to try to limit it to its time and space, so that
they can put more emphasis on the verses of the scripture that we see as having
been abrogated by the verses of the sword. And as far as, you know,
taqiyya is concerned, this whole thing about taqiyya — and I don’t deny taqiyya
exists; it obviously does.

But you know, I remember, when I was a mafia prosecutor,
they have a rule, too, you know — they call it omertà. And we used to get
these mobsters in who wanted to cooperate with the government, and we’d get to
interview them a little bit, you know. And they’d tell me about, you
know, the secret code they had of omertà. And I remember sitting there
and saying — all right, let me get this straight. You’re part of a secret
criminal organization, and you have this rule that you don’t tell anybody
anything. Wow, where do you guys come up with this stuff?

I kind of see taqiyya the same way. I mean, if you’re
dealing with Islamists, if lying serves their purposes, obviously they’re going
to lie. But the fact that there is a doctrine of lying doesn’t mean that
everybody who has the opportunity to lie will do so. I mean, some of the
people who say that they are trying to interpret their doctrine a different way
actually authentically mean that they’re trying to interpret their doctrine a
different way. They’re not trying to pull one over on you.

Baroness Caroline Cox:Sorry, can I just –

Karen Lugo:I want to allow
Baroness Cox a second.

Baroness Caroline Cox:Okay. Maybe I could just try and answer your
question, sir. I come from the land
of Chamberlain. And
we stood alone for awhile fighting Nazi Germany. And I would say to
you, nothing I’ve said today suggests we should not adopt the strongest
possible line. I don’t want to be a Chamberlain. That’s why I’m
introducing a bill in the House of Lords to try and address this issue of the
growth of political Islam in the United Kingdom. Suggest to
you I’d like to see –

(Applause)

– I’d like to see some parliamentary or government
initiatives in the United
States. We can have wonderful
conferences. We can talk, we can learn. That’s not going to change
the situation. We’ve got to do things politically and
strategically. And that’s why I’ve introduced the bill. But also,
there must be (inaudible) more space if there are the other Muslims who want to
support the defense of democracy, they’ve got a chance to do so, too.

Unidentified Audience Member:What I’m saying is I don’t think anything is going to
happen until (inaudible).

Bosch Fawstin:Yeah, that’s probably true.

Unidentified Audience Member: (Inaudible — microphone
inaccessible)

Karen Lugo:Okay, Amy?

Unidentified Audience Member:My concern is the motivation for the giving of space.
So on one hand, you want to get, I guess, help from the Muslim community to
achieve various ends. And one question is — how much help are you
actually getting from them? Or [is the] concern to give them the
opportunity to stand up for the right thing — which is nice, but it isn’t like
you’re preventing them from standing up for the right thing. Sometimes
giving them space in that regard could be a sacrifice for us. So I am
concerned about that.

The other issue — (inaudible) –

Karen Lugo:I think –

Unidentified Audience Member:— are we going to be sacrificing by doing this, or are we
furthering our interests by giving them space?

Karen Lugo:And it’s a very
good question. And I think — just one second here — it’s a matter of
developing some confidence and trust in us to do better than the Europeans have
done in defending our culture and our freedom of speech, and all the rights,
self-government, the things we hold so dear. I mean, do we have a deep
enough belief in those things to defend them, and to also then recognize that
there are Muslims who would aid us in that? Andy?

Andrew McCarthy:Since I’m the one who said give them space, let me try to
be a little bit more concrete about what I meant. I meant give them
rhetorical space, and understand that they have their own struggle that they’re
trying to go through. I wasn’t suggesting that we take any other national
security — I’m Attila the Hun on national security. I absolutely think
that we have to have our eyes open about not only the people who want to
destroy this country by violent jihadism, but the broader civilizational threat
to the United States and to the West, which is profound.

My point is that we do have allies in that community.
We don’t have as many as we would like to have — not by a long shot. But
we have to have a way to separate who those allies are from the rest of the
broader threat.

Now, Robert and I have talked about, you know, Islamists
and whether that’s an appropriate label or not. But I think — and Robert
can address this, but even Robert will use the term “supremacist Muslim,” or,
you know, some other adjective. I think we all grope with this need that
we all know that we have, to one degree or another, to say yes, there are
people out there who are in that community, who are either our allies or our
potential allies, and we’re not trying to drive them into the arms of the other
side. But we have to come up with a way to acknowledge that.

Robert Spencer:The problem about giving them space is — all I’m saying
here is that we can’t give them space by lying to them or lying to
ourselves. That’s not any legitimate kind of space. And the whole
Islamist idea — that a radical Islamist is the one who carries out terrorist
attacks, and ordinary Muslims wouldn’t do that — the problem is there isn’t any
distinction within the Muslim community. It isn’t as if there’s the
radical Islamist mosque on one block and the moderate mosque on the next block,
and there’s some sort of institutional distinction, like between Baptists and
Methodists. They’re all mixed up together. How do you become an
Islamist? You perform an act of terrorism.

When Andy and I had the exchange in National Review, right
that day, there was a Bosnian who went to Sarajevo
and shot up the US
embassy. And all the stories about him said he was a radical Islamist who
shot at the US
embassy. Well, that was Friday. On Thursday, he was just an
ordinary Muslim.

Andrew McCarthy:[Well] –

Robert Spencer:And he became a radical Islamist when he shot up the
embassy. There wasn’t any indication otherwise, in his life, in his
movements, in his associations, that would’ve given you the impression that he
would ever had committed a terrorist act. And this just shows the
uselessness of this distinction that is imposed from without and is not within
the Muslim community.

I’d also like to add, in terms of giving them space, that
while the perspective that I espouse may be the dominant view in this room —
and for that I thank you all — it is a very, very small minority view that is
routinely demonized, vilified and dismissed in the mainstream culture, as I’m
sure you’re all well aware.

And the point that I’m making is that this is — we’ve been
giving them space for 10 years. We’ve been pretending that Islam is a
religion of peace. We’ve been encouraging — we’ve been assuming, on an
official international policy level and in national policy, that Islam is a
religion of peace and that the vast majority of Muslims — 99.99 percent — are
on our side and completely loyal to Western civilizational principles of
freedom.

And what has it gotten us? Where do we see large
numbers of Muslims, large organizations of Muslims — even any sect, anything —
that is fighting against this within Islam? There’s little groups here,
little groups there. There’s Zuhdi, of course. And what else?

Andrew McCarthy:I do agree that if we’re going to start saying “radical
Islamist,” then the term “Islamist” is useless. And I’m not recommending
that. I thought “Islamist” was our liberation from having to say that
Islam is the problem period, and move on.

You know, I think Islamists are people who want to impose
Sharia on the West. They are people who want to live the mainstream
interpretation of Islam that Robert talks about.

They include violent jihadists who want to do it by
means of terrorism. But if we’re going to start to parse, you know,
radical Islamists from moderate Islamists, then I agree. I throw up my
hands, and we’re talking nonsense. But I don’t think we’re at that point
yet.

Karen Lugo:Do we have one
last question? Okay.

Unidentified Audience Member:Seems so far that attempts at reforming Islam have not
gotten any traction. I attended, for example, (inaudible) summit four
years ago in St. Petersburg,
Florida. Participants were
either outright apostate, like (inaudible), or like (inaudible) considered
apostates by most Muslims.

Question to the panel is — do you see in the future any
hope that there will be a real reformation of Islam (inaudible) doctrine of
abrogation, supremacy of the Hadith, and so forth? Or is the choice in
perpetuity going to be either perpetual warfare between Islam and the
infidels? Or eradicating Islam at the end of a war, as was done to
national socialists at the end of World War II?

Bosch Fawstin:Well, Islam is not going to be eradicated. It’s much
bigger than national socialism ever was. And I just wanted to say that —
Andy just said a minute ago that if we say Islam is the problem, then that will
discourage reformers. But Islam is the problem. The problem is
within Islam. But does that mean that there can be no reform ever, or
that Muslims cannot confront this and change it? No, it certainly doesn’t
mean that. Anything is possible in history, and nobody could’ve predicted
the Christian Reformation a few hundred years before it happened.

It’s historically theoretically possible. But we
shouldn’t kid ourselves about the size of the groups that might affect it in
our age. They are minuscule. And they are not traditional and have
no basis within Islamic theology or law to stand on. They have their own
private and invented Islam.

Karen Lugo:Before we –

Unidentified Speaker:Just one thing — sorry.

Karen Lugo:Sure.

Unidentified Speaker:This whole conversation and everything is — you know,
outside of a post-jihad world, it’s all academic, in a sense. Because
again, we are at war. And until we take out the countries that sponsor
terrorism — I mean, the countries who sponsor terrorism, the rest of the Muslim
world will be in [shock and awe]. They will moderate themselves by nature.
They will have to. They would have no choice. They’ll see the
results, like Japan did,
like Germany
did. And that’s — in a post-jihad world, that’s when we can get serious
about average Muslims going out there and reforming something that was never what
it was. They can pretend and deny, whatever, you know, the history of
Mohammad, and what he was and what he did, to join the civilized world,
finally, after a thousand years.

Karen Lugo:Before we thank
our panelists one more time —Frank
Gaffneyis going to be
holding a seminar in this very room as soon as we conclude, talking about the
record ofGrover
Norquistand his
activities. So any who want to stay for that, please do. And please
thank our panelists one more time.

No comments:

About Me

Apr 2017 - 4.1 Mil Pg Views, March 2013 - Posted my paper introducing CLOUD COSMOLOGY & NEUTRAL NEUTRINO rigorously described, September 2010 I am pleased to report that my essay titled A NEW METRIC WITH APPLICATIONS TO PHYSICS AND SOLVING CERTAIN HIGHER ORDERED DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS' has been published in Physics Essays(AIP) and appeared in their June 2010 quarterly. 40 years ago I took an honors degree in applied mathematics from the University of Waterloo. My interest was Relativity and my last year there saw me complete a 900 level course under Hanno Rund on his work in relativity,as well as differential geometry(pure math) and of course analysis. I continued researching new ideas and knowledge since that time and I have prepared a book for publication titled Paradigms Shift&. I maintain my blog as a day book and research tool to retain data and record impressions and interpretations on material read. Do join my blog and receive Four items of interest daily Monday through Saturday.